Fire protection bills pile up for forest owners

But times have changed.

DeFrees said forest owners are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, with little or no money coming in from timber harvests on one side, and soaring firefighting costs attributed to declining forest health on the other.

John Buckman, the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Northeast District forester, said that this year private landowners paid about $1.58 per acre for fire protection on property classified as timberland.

According to an ODF graph, this year’s fire protection rate was the highest in the past decade due to higher than expected firefighting costs in 2006 and 2007.

When Oregon’s timber industry was booming, paying fire patrol assessments and other government fees wasn’t a problem for Lyle Defrees and other Baker County private woodland owners.

But times have changed.

DeFrees said forest owners are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, with little or no money coming in from timber harvests on one side, and soaring firefighting costs attributed to declining forest health on the other.

John Buckman, the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Northeast District forester, said that this year private landowners paid about $1.58 per acre for fire protection on property classified as timberland.

According to an ODF graph, this year’s fire protection rate was the highest in the past decade due to higher than expected firefighting costs in 2006 and 2007.

The rate is expected to drop slightly in 2010, though, because firefighting costs were lower than expected during the relatively tranquil fire seasons of 2008 and 2009.

State Forester Marvin Brown said his agency is proposing other ways to reduce the annual fire protection cost for landowners in Baker County and elsewhere in Eastern Oregon.

Defrees, who is a member of the ODF committee that reviews firefighting costs each year and helps set the rates for Baker County landowners, said his fire protection bill totaled $1,900 this year.

Because log prices are so low, Defrees said he’ll have to pay that bill with income from his livestock grazing and cattle operations, which are also down this year due to low cattle prices.

Many forest owners in Northeastern Oregon face a similar dilemma this year,  Defrees said.

“We are having a hard time paying the assessments on our land, when we are not getting any return on our forest products,” Defrees said.

State law requires forest owners to pay half of the state’s annual firefighting costs, while the state general fund picks up the other half.

Randy Guyer, who serves as secretary/treasurer for the Baker County Private Woodlands Association, said the decline in demand for logs, coupled with mill closures, has created kind of a Catch 22 situation in which forest owners, as well as the agencies that manage public lands, struggle to pay for fuels reduction and thinning projects designed to reduce the frequency and severity of unnatural, stand-replacing fires that cause firefighting costs to skyrocket.

When trees burn that could have been harvested to make lumber, paper or a variety of biomass products, including electricity, Guyer said private landowners lose the potential value of those trees, in addition to paying higher fire patrol assessments.

Governor proposes fee hike

Despite the financial hardships faced by forest owners, Gov. Ted Kulongoski proposed this year to increase the percentage of fire protection assessments private landowners pay from 50 percent to 55 percent.

The governor’s budget proposal would have been a change from the longstanding formula requiring the 50/50 split.

State Forester Marvin Brown said the governor proposed boosting the landowners share to 55 percent of firefighting costs, while reducing the state’s share to 45 percent, due to the recession and declining tax revenues for the general fund.

Brown said the Oregon Legislature, however, nixed the governor’s proposal after hearing forest landowners from Baker County and across Eastern Oregon testify about their financial woes due to declining timber harvests, closure of lumber mills and falling demand for lumber from the region.

ODF forest lands reclassification

In light of the fragile state of the timber industry in Eastern Oregon, Brown said the ODF is now looking at options for doing the opposite of what Kulongoski proposed.

Rather than require landowners to pay a larger percentage of fire protection costs, ODF is proposing to lower that percentage for forest owners in Eastern Oregon.

Part of that effort involves a forest lands reclassification program that will assess higher fees to forestland undergoing urbanization, primarily on the west side of the state.

Raising fees on westside owners could allow ODF to lower fees for undeveloped, less valuable private forests east of the Cascades, Brown said.

Grants for fuels reduction

Brown said ODF also has had some success securing federal grant money and distributing it to private landowners to help pay for fuels reduction and forest health thinning projects.

Those fuels reduction programs, Brown said, are a cost-effective tool for lowering firefighting costs and forest patrol assessments by reducing the threat of large, unnatural stand-replacing crown fires.

In Baker County, private woodland owners are working with several individuals and companies interested in developing or expanding biomass processing in the county, whether they get federal stimulus funding or not.

Wildfire Reduction Act

Another effort to reduce firefighting costs borne by the state and private landowners is called the Wildfire Reduction Act, which ODF proposed but didn’t get funded during the 2009 legislative session due to declining general fund revenues.

“At a minimum we will try again,” Brown said, adding that a group of legislators has agreed to help him look for areas where funding may be shifted in ODF’s 2010 fiscal budget to pay for components of the Wildfire Reduction Act and reduce fire protection assessments paid by Eastern Oregon woodland owners.

“We are trying to control landowner costs. We are trying, but it takes time,” Brown said.

The ODF staff is still looking for alternative ways to fund the Wildfire Reduction Act, which is designed to tackle forest health and fuel loading problems more aggressively.

 Brown said that approach is cheaper than letting forest health deteriorate until a lightning strike explodes into a catastrophic crown fire capable of scorching thousands of acres before it is contained, often only with nature’s help.

The Wildfire Reduction Act was developed by a task force comprising representatives from the timber industry, private landowners, government forest managers and environmental groups, who agreed to its provisions, including the emphasis on doing more forest health thinning and more aggressive firefighting to keep fires from growing into catastrophic infernos that send firefighting costs through the roof, Brown said.